911 Speakout About the War on Terror
September 11, 2004 --
Susan Galleymore stood in San Francisco's UN Plaza
in front of a cardboard wall of pictures. The boards were papered with the
photos of U.S. service personnel killed in Iraq. The images included
faceless icons representing some of the tens of thousands of Iraqi
civilians killed. This is the ongoing tragedy of the U.S. invasion of
Iraq, a brutal effort to control a portion of the world solely for profit
that enriches a few U.S. corporations and the people who run them.
How many have been killed and wounded? Susan explained that we are not getting the truth. On the 3rd anniversary of the 911 attack on New York, even though General Tommy Franks has said the U.S. military doesn't keep body counts, the American authorities do provide numbers. As of Friday, September 10, 2004, the Federal Government reported 1007 U.S. soldiers dead, 7012 wounded. Unofficial numbers are higher. The head chaplain at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. says he does not know how many have been killed and wounded. The Linstahl Medical Center in Germany reports that it has treated over 12,000 wounded who were evacuated from Iraq. Bill Moyers claimed in June of this year that 16,000 had been wounded.
The numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths are yet more uncertain, though by some counts, they are as high as 30,000. www.iraqbodycount.org reported the number of civilians killed by the war in a range from 11797 to 13806 on September 13, 2004. Susan read a list of numbers killed, city by city, totaling 37,137. There are no really reliable numbers, of course, though all sets of figures are gruesomely unreal. How could so many be destroyed so anonymously?
Susan went on to say that the numbers game cannot
begin to count the number of days lost from the future, the number of
heartbeats lost, the number of hopes that will never be realized. The war
is wiping out lives and crippling a culture, an ancient and significant
history, part of our own heritage extending back to biblical times. The
war erases the lives of those dead and changes their families forever. For
every statistic on a list of dead, official or unofficial, a widening
circle of pain envelopes brothers, sisters, wives, children who mourn the
death of what could have been, what should have been.
In the 911 Speakout About the War on Terror, mothers who have children injured and killed by this war recounted their stories so that you can know how it feels to be struck by war. In the following pages click on the names of those who spoke to hear their testimony.
Click here to listen to Annie and the Vets, a three piece musical group from Veterans for Peace who sang at the rally. (A Macromedia Flash file, 4 min 56 sec)
Click here to listen to Susan Galleymore, author of MotherSpeak.org (Macromedia flash file, 4 min 19 sec)
